Photographs by Pat Martin

Not long after I walked through the open door of Thomas McGuane’s Montana farmhouse, his dog Cooper at my heels, he ushered me back out for a tour of the ranch and the trout-studded freestone stream that bisects it. It occurred to me to ask if I should be watching for rattlesnakes as we pushed through the brush in the sweltering heat. McGuane told me there was nothing to worry about, then added that he had stepped on, and been bitten by, a rattlesnake the year before last. “That’s how I learned I need a hearing aid,” he said dryly. He apologized for being an unsteady walker, though I was having trouble keeping up with his brisk pace across unfamiliar terrain.

McGuane, an athletic 85, lives on 2,000 acres of rolling prairie in the Boulder River Valley, 75 miles e

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